This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

With the invention of the electronic calculator, schoolchildren are the only ones who fret over doing arithmetic by hand. Similarly, you might be surprised at how many commercial artists don’t draw from scratch anymore. Many of them earn their daily bread using computer graphics software such as Photoshop Elements to make photos look like fine art.

When you’ve worked through the tasks in this Part, you’ll know many of their secrets. You can make greeting cards and party invitations look as if they were hand-drawn by a skilled sketch artist, create photorealistic illustrations for flyers and newsletters, and add expensive-looking graphics that give a professional touch to your personal Website.

Photoshop Elements helps you achieve artistic effects by way of filters that can transform an image with a click, but in complex ways. The program comes with a wide variety of filters, and you can download even more of them (called plug-ins) from www.adobe.com and other vendors’ Websites. There are far too many filters to cover them all here, but you’ll see enough to show you how easy they are to apply—and to start you thinking about all the creative possibilities.

How Did You Do That?

Before It helps to start with a photo that has an interesting composition, and some bright colors and contrasts.

After Here’s some “fine art” that took less than a minute to make. It’s the result of adding both the Palette Knife artistic filter and a Sandstone texture, and finally adjusting Hue for brighter greenery.